Why do people who would not otherwise litter think it's OK to throw a cigarette butt on the ground? (True story: I was behind a car with Greenpeace, Sierra Club and Peta bumper stickers and I saw the driver toss a lit cigarette toward a stand of trees on a dry day.) There is an urban myth that cigarettes are biodegradable because they appear to be paper and cotton. Well, the filter is made of cellulose acetate (a plastic), and contains trace amounts of cadmium, lead and arsenic, and of course, nicotine. And they are all over the place, and ending up in the sewers, in the waterways, in the soil. Yuck! Years ago, I used to manage a retail store. Every morning, I would sweep the front of the store and discard about 20 cigarette butts. A day! And this was on a nice, suburban, tree-lined street. I'm sure shop managers in cities sweep up hundreds a day. What will it take to make this a socially- unacceptable practice? What other options do smokers have if they finish a cigarette while walking somewhere?
1 comment:
If nothing else, at least less people are smokers now... so hopefully that lessens to some degree the amount of litter they leave behind. I guess at this point there's not much incentive to place butt-disposal containers on every street corner, as it would just seem like encouraging people to smoke.
I wonder if anyone has done any research into the environmental impact of smoking, not just the human-body damage.
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